


Letters by Messenger

by emokid6969



Series: Please Come Home [1]
Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes (Downey films), Sherlock Holmes (Mitchell & Webb closing sketch), Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Angst, Love, Other, Romance, horrible undead transformation and possible redemption storyline?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:08:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28370634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emokid6969/pseuds/emokid6969
Summary: Watson has saved Holmes' life too many times to bear watching Holmes forget them in a slow death. Holmes is desperate for Watson, but who is Holmes now? And will there ever be a true return of Sherlock Holmes?
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Series: Please Come Home [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2077776
Kudos: 4





	Letters by Messenger

It was after the Falls that Holmes took with a strange pneumonia. I could not trace the origin to another human but there could have easily been some sinister bacteria in the place where Moriarty fell. And it was also true that the university laboratories did not burn Moriarty's greenhouse, but sealed it off, where it grew and coiled under hot plastic.

For a long time, I was unable to heal them. Their fevers grew worse, and they would deduce the strains of tea I had consumed three days ago and yet fail to remember who I was at the exact same time.

And yet there was an unearthly familiarity still, for Holmes was keen and, though not seemingly able anymore to choose which paths of deduction they followed, they seemed desperate for affirmation from me, even as my hair thinned from the sleepless nights of attempting to convince them to try remedial solutions that I felt sure they would have come to on their own with ease in their health.

There was a fire in the grate at all times. Holmes stayed wrapped in blankets, and their skin split at the touch of even the finest of wools. Mrs. Hudson volunteered shawls and so it was discovered that, when wrapped in silk and fed the ester of sunlight, Holmes could drink weak honeyed tea, and so for the first time in too long they stopped retreating horrifyingly into their own skeleton, and could breathe outside air without sickness.

And yet now the strangest things were poison, and what little recovery Holmes made was pulled back each time a new food worsened their condition. And I stopped seeing Holmes, for it had been such a lengthy sickness that I could barely remember who they had been, and I started referring to my notes to remember. They had been kind, and forward, and gloriously unfazed by the strangest of truths. And they had loved me, I was sure, more than they had loved anyone, and we had planned a glorious reign of discovering beautiful secrets of chemistry, of narrative; but I was forgetting when they had started to forget me and could only remember their terrified eyes, wide in darkened rooms, begging me for reassurance of my love and yet not seeming to comprehend as I offered it. My heart froze, cold and painful, and yet still I loved them.

For the first time, Holmes treated me like a client, and disregarded my intelligence without seeming to consider its existence even possible, and I truly believed they meant it, though I tried to remember their sickness, and my head would swim as they introduce me to their delivery-people with florid commentary on the details I had missed in my latest published recounting of our glorious past adventures together. They insisted, sometimes, that they did so because they wanted to pursue the mystery of my narrative discrepancies, and it was unclear whether they believed they were doing this for my benefit or that of the delivery-people; nevertheless, I asked them to stop and they stared at me, eyes wide and blank, and yet somehow also still reading the medical journals of Dr. James Barry. But after such a long sickness, it did not seem to me to be a genuine pursuit, and I wondered whether they could even comprehend what they read, or whether there was just some undead part of them still living through the old habits, of lifting a book and passing it through vision, unseen.

I began to feel passed through. I began to try to push Holmes to become human.

And I began to sleep on the worst chair in the sitting room, the folding one I took when traveling, and deny Holmes when they would beg for my touch, because I was not sure I would ever truly see Holmes again. And as their pleas grew louder, I moved the chair to the open porch and wrapped myself in blankets out in the winter air, and nursed a cold which faded in and out, and which tore at my muscles.

But as Holmes amassed their new list of which things would not cause months of illness, and slowly began digesting again, they began to fiercely investigate their disease with a focus I had missed. It was not their incisive former gaze, but it was determined, and even as Holmes seemed barely able to hold me in their vision, they flicked discerningly with their old alarming speed through my entire medical library, and began special-ordering solutions by carriage-horse which I would have to carry inside for them within minutes of their delivery lest the rain turn their paper containers into formless mush.

There were experiments and occasional successes with folk remedies, some of which we had both derided in our earlier cases, and it was while Holmes was rubbing dandelion pollen on their face, coating it in a golden glow to cure air-sickness, that I saw Holmes seem able to truly feel any pleasing sensation. And yet it terrified me, because I could not bear to have Holmes plead with me in the dark for affection and not recognize it when it was so explicitly given again, and so I pretended that their past disregard for me was just the way things were now, and I stopped telling them I loved them.

Fear was constant in Holmes; they would hide from me behind a locked bedroom door, leaving me to feel abandoned and neglected and spiteful and acutely, horribly alone, and then after an unbearable length would, with great urgency, beg me to embrace them, to which I, overwhelmed and having forgotten any reason to trust them, would run and hide, causing Holmes to cry after me with terrifying urgency.

And Holmes became slowly more solid, and yet stayed distraught as I stayed on the balcony. My cold intensified, and I became so tired of this still-reduced Holmes, so impatient for them to become as lucid and luminescent and endlessly, gloriously loving as we had been together, that I could not keep from telling them their every flaw. A thousand patients who Holmes and I would have found only interesting as a hobby for us to jointly investigate the problems of, providing solutions in glorious synchronicity, suddenly seemed like the only possible company now that any version of Holmes I missed seemed barely possible after such thorough physical transformation. Holmes curled in the bathroom, covering their ears and begging me to embrace them as I washed out their stinking bedpan once again, clanking it against the sink so that Holmes cried out and I knew they were at least doing something in relation to me, feeling thoroughly neglected and nursing an ambient disgust for the entire situation: I had been a real doctor. I had helped more people than just Holmes, than just this endless sickness that ate away at both our hearts so that I would rather leave Holmes to be alone than watch them stay half-alive and haunt me with who they had once been. It became easy to forget that I was Holmes' only love, their whole light, and so I left one day in mid-October and did not return for two months, despite letters from Holmes begging me to return, which made no mention of their love for me but were specific, physical requests.

After I had waited what surely would be long enough to observe some meaningful change in them, I came by the flat to offer myself as a friend and occasional assistant, and Holmes, though clearly fuller in the chest and legs and distinctly less frail, was haggard and hesitant, responding quickly in banter but staying silent and consistently teary-eyed during our many moments of affection. I had dressed in silk, and washed myself of all the road-dust which would cause Holmes ill, and yet Holmes seemed afraid to touch my skin, grasping my shirtwaist with desperation and yet not saying they loved me even once in my entire visit, even to soften the banter, and so I was washed with that old familiar anger even as I stayed, and gave affection when it was asked for.

The anger kept simmering as Holmes sent a live messenger to my new flat, to beg me for assistance with a task I was sure they had no need of me for. And the live messenger was very specific, that Holmes loved me and wanted to be with me what we had been before sickness ate away at us, when we loved and dreamed together, and floated through the world on the feet of new discovery. When Holmes had played the violin, and had worked on building the perfect chin-rest for the violin we had chosen together, and had marveled at the music I would improvise on lap-harp with genuine joy and boundless love. And I was shocked with a full-body sense of being thrown out of myself, and so I laughed and began mocking Holmes' deduction skills with my new acquaintances, and sent a return message, that although I had offered myself as a friend and occasional assistant, I felt completely disregarded, and could not see Holmes while I continued to feel so.

So Holmes sent more letters, with words that should have been said when I had stopped by the flat, words that would have felt sincere during our many embraces and which, now in letter form, despite Holmes' insistence that they had been trying not to overwhelm me before, that they had been wordless out of loving nervousness, felt flat. Was Holmes even back? Was there even enough weight on Holmes' bones yet for there to be the person I loved behind these letters? I had mockingly, but also sincerely, demanded payment for embracing Holmes, insisting that it was a way for them to assure me of the sincerity of their love, and Holmes sent letters asking me what I wanted, and how much for me to come home.

I did not know how to determine if Holmes was really back. And I knew that me being away would tear apart Holmes if they were truly well, but I could not make my muscles move towards their flat without twinges of that same overwhelming fear: that I would look at them and see the sickness, and that their heart would feel empty when I pressed my whole self against it. And so I stayed away for too long, and their heart stayed bruised for longer than I had wanted by the time I had the courage to return and see them loving me again.

_My dear Watson, I am not a poet. There are exactly fifty truly important things to me and they are all you. Except that you are not a thing, and yet I don't have words to describe the wonderful noun you are. I wish to persuade you of my love's sincerity except I have a mortal fear of failing to do just that, which stops up my words and almost entirely ensures failure, so that I often prefer to say nothing and hope my glances of longing are illustrative, that my specific, direct requests for your presence are clearly coming from affection. And yet you are the most important thing to me, and so I devote my whole self to each expression of affection, to each solid truth of my love for you._

_Always,_

_Sherlock Holmes_

**Author's Note:**

> Plastic was invented 1862, and Sherlock Holmes' first adventure was around 1878. Moriarty, as a botanist, would have pursued plastics and experimented with its properties as applicable to botanical greenhousing, which frequently had issues with fires when its panels which, since they were entirely glass, would cause plants to combust under a too-strongly magnified sunlight.


End file.
